May 13 - 133/365

18-55mm lens @ 29mm, f/7.1, 1/80, ISO 200

Germany has so many amazing things to see and great experiences to be had. Castles. Beer. Sausages. Mountains. Wine. The list goes on and on. But it is hard for me to imagine stepping foot into Germany without spending some time visiting its dark side.... the era of Nazi control and World War II. On our way from Innsbruck, Austria to Munich, Germany, we stopped to visit the Dachau concentration camp just outside the city of Munich. While Dachau is not as infamous as the camps that participated in the mass extermination of Jews, such as Auschwitz in Poland, Dachau was the very first concentration camp and the only camp to be operational for the entire duration of WWII. My husband and I have both visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., but as moving as that experience was, it was nothing compared to the feeling of touring the isolation cells, walking through reconstructed barracks where the laborers wasted away, and seeing the crematoriums where the masses of people which were worked and starved to death were cremated. The museum was packed with history from the rise of the Nazi political regime to the liberation of the camp by the Allies, and it will definitely be an experience we will never forget.